Posted
by
samzenpuson Friday March 08, 2013 @04:05AM
from the tattle-tail dept.

Dupple writes with a story about the latest in the Google-Microsoft feud. "The tired spat between Google and Microsoft just got a lot more interesting after reports that the search giant tipped off European authorities to antitrust concerns, a tip that will now cost the Windows-maker nearly a billion dollars. When news of the fine levied by the European Union's competition watchdog broke on Wednesday, nobody was too surprised that the European Commission was punishing Microsoft for bullying consumers. But with a recent headline-stealing dispute between the Redmond, Washington company and Google, it's competitor down in Mountain View, California, bloggers got curious. Early Wednesday evening, The Wall Street Journal's Tom Gara wondered, 'Did Google Snitch?' According to a Financial Times report published a few minutes later, the answer is yes."

Microsoft has been paying millions to lobby EU staff and politicians to attack Google over non-issues, that's far worse than Google pointing out to the EU that Microsoft was in breach of it's obligations as a result of the investigation against them.

I assume the nearly a billion dollars thing comes from the exchange rate as I believe the figure you quote is euros no?

Neither company should be using government to hamper its competitors, and government shouldn't have the power to be the servant of interests trying to hurt others to give themselves economic advantage.

Not only that, but the article linked provides no actual background to how it is "known" that Google "snitched" - just an unsourced quote.A little digging indicates that the quote comes from a Financial Times article [ft.com] (registration required). Here are the relevant paragraphs:

Brussels punished Microsoft for failing to give at least 15m consumers a choice of web browser - a violation of a voluntary antitrust pact that was spotted and raised by Google and Opera, according to several people familiar with the case.

The US software group was left to police its own compliance and Mr Almunia said the lapse was brought to his attention by a Microsoft rival. According to people involved, Google and Opera informally provided the tip-off and helped investigators.

This is very informative. It tells us that the only source for the 'snitch' allegation is a quote from another Murdoch publication.

Once again the Murdoch empire shows its true colours. Given their behaviour, and Rupert's insatiable hunger for media monopoly, I will assume until I have seen proof otherwise that this is an orchestrated hit piece to slander the legislative process in the EU, in order to deflect attention away from the rapaciousness of News Corp and its subsidiaries.

I think you're incorrect on the first part. From the linked FT article:

"The US software group was left to police its own compliance and Mr Almunia [EU competition supremo] said the lapse was brought to his attention by a Microsoft rival. According to people involved, Google and Opera informally provided the tip-off and helped investigators"

Another fun snippet:

"The episode was cited as a reason for giving Steve Ballmer, chief executive, only half his potential bonus last year."

It takes somebody (who has their own share of EU investigations going on) that know how to say the RIGHT WORDS to get the courts action.

Of course Microsoft is happily making up FUD and telling the people regulating Microsoft to go big Google and Apple.

The moral of the story is that the tech companies have grown up and learned to use regulators as their personal toys. Of course if the companies all "did the right thing" there would be fewer things to snitch on.

Wow. You're a moron. Everyone very clearly didn't notice since it didn't disappear for "nearly everyone". In fact it disappeared for almost nobody. Your ignorance is even worse than your ability to convert EUR to USD.

We use Windows 7 N at work. Nice to be able to install the video player one prefers, without having to fight Windows Media Player.

In what way do you have to fight WMP? You can set the default player by file type (and all video players give you the option to make their program the default). Plus you can go into "Turn Windows features on or off" and remove Windows Media Player completely in standard Windows 7.

You can probably do the same thing in Windows 8 by moving the mouse to four seventeenths of the way down the screen near the left side (right side in the sourthern hemisphere) and draw six anti-clockwise circles.

In what way do you have to fight WMP? You can set the default player by file type (and all video players give you the option to make their program the default). Plus you can go into "Turn Windows features on or off" and remove Windows Media Player completely in standard Windows 7.

Well, I'm not the person you are replying to, but I installed the N version of Windows 7, and everything was cool and froody. I installed my favourite mp3 player, foobar2000, and all was well. Then I needed to get a Windows Performance Index for my PC, and for that I needed to install WMP. And, crazily, I lost the context menus in Explorer for "Play in foobar2000" and "Enqueue in foobar2000." After trying many registry tweaks I researched, I uninstalled WMP and got my menus back. I suspect that's the kind of fighting that the person you are replying to experienced.

I think I only got the full Aero UI experience once I'd installed WMP and calculated my WPI, but I might be wrong on that front.

One thing I've been unable to do in Win 7 is get the default 'play' context menu item to accept my preferred player.

I can 'Play in VLC' from the context menu, but the bold, top of the menu 'play' refuses to be anything other than WMP. I might be able to fix it by enabling autorun and setting the autoplay to VLC, but I don't want autorun enabled on my system.

I've always been able to get it to work fine - you must have missed an option or something.

n you're asserting you know better than Microsoft what should be done to their OS

Who doesn't know better than Microlost? For example, does anyone think Metro was a good idea? Hot corners? Burying "turn off" in Control Pnael, several clicks away from the desktop? One might say that any argument predicated on Microsoft having a clue is suspect.

You would never say that $734m was "almost half a billion" in English. You might say "over half a billion" but it would be more accurate to say "almost three quarters of a billion" rather than "almost a billion".

Sorry, but I got hung up on the numbers as well. "not quite 3/4 billion dollars" does not equal "almost a billion dollars". When someone says "almost a billion", I most definitely expect something more than.8 billion. Less than.75 is simply not "almost".

I don't think you quite understand how the tech world has changed. With the rise of Android, iOS and OSX, Microsoft has become the new underdog. It's only right and just to give minority OSes your support when big corporate bullies try to take them down.

Remember the love, people. When new items of hardware are released, make sure the question is asked here on/., "Sure, but can it run Windows??"

I don't think you quite understand how the tech world has changed. With the rise of Android, iOS and OSX, Microsoft has become the new underdog.

Microsoft the new underdog? With 90% userbase on desktops I can hardly believe that. They cannot keep up with online services like Bing and Hotmail loses ground, and even Windows is losing to OSX, Chrome and possibly Ubuntu, but that doesn't count until Windows dives below 50% on the desktop.

MS still has a near monopoly on the computers people use for office and engineering work. Yes a lot of people have andrios or iOS smartphones but they are in addition to a windows PC, not instead of a windows PC.

I'm trying really, really hard, but I can't remember any love from Microsoft toward it's customers. Ever. Back in the day, ***DOS was available from a variety of sources, free or dirt cheap. MSDOS cost over a hundred dollars. I picked up a package at my local computer store, inspected it, read the marketing hype on the label, and told the wife, "I think I'll get this MSDOS 5.0." I got to the counter, and when the sales clerk told me that it cost something like $125, I put it back on

I'm not sure that being a monopolist is any kind of crime, so being convicted of such a thing does not seem possible? However, I have seen such language here before and I would like to emphasize that they were convicted of being monopoly abusers, as in.. they abused their fully legal monopoly position. I feel that there are different possible PR angles around these terms, and it is important that we do not encourage that.

It would be news if Google or some other competitor did not, because that would be collusion, or cartel behavior. In the free market we have competition, and part of competition is ratting out your competitors when they don't follow code. On problem we have is that so many firms just go along with illegal behavior, joining in because everyone else is doing it, and that means honest firms often get left behind, leading to the kind of dishonesty that harms people and forces the taxpayer to bail out industri

Good point. Collusion will get you in a lot of trouble in the US. I can't believe it's not a crime in the EU. Had Google NOT snitched, they'd likely be setting themselves up for charges against themselves.

Because Google is in ruins? I don't disagree that them "snitch"ing is a non-issue under the circumstances, but they're not exactly falling apart here.

Looking at it from another perspective, Google have a fairly strong grip on the search market (not monopoly-esque, per se, there are available alternatives but the fact that people don't tell you to "search for it" but "Google for it" demonstrates their entrenchment in the marketplace). They certainly don't *advertise* other browsers in their products, exce

the real shame here is that the EU still considers Microsoft's position to be an unfair advantage over its competitors browsers

It was and still is monopoly abuse. The fact that browsers exist on mobile devices where Microsoft is a laughing stock because its not an entrenched monopoly is just an aside. The reality is perhaps the EU should take a closer look at iOS and Android, to ensure that users are given a choice there, as we have seen the damage that Microsoft did [does] to the internet should not be allowed to move to other devices.

The shame here is it took browsers generation ahead....and a complete paradigm shift in computin

I did a search in Google. When searching for "Web browsers" IE was an extra small link at the very bottom of the page. Top result was Wikipedia, which I'm sure lists them a.. (i didn't bother to check), but just food for thought.

I did a search in Google. When searching for "Web browsers" IE was an extra small link at the very bottom of the page. Top result was Wikipedia, which I'm sure lists them a.. (i didn't bother to check), but just food for thought.

And if you search for "web browsers" on Bing IE doesn't show up at all except in a side bar under 'related searches'. Seems MS hasn't done any SEO for IE under the term 'web browser'.

It was illegal and a violation of the agreement that Microsoft themselves signed with the EU after Microsoft lost the browser bundling court case. That's all that matters. The EU said "you can't do that" to Microsoft, Microsoft fought it hard in court, Microsoft lost, Microsoft agreed to a specific remedy, Microsoft then violated that remedy, Microsoft gets fined to send a message to any company that might think it's not that big a deal to violate a legal agreement with the EU.
Whether it was sensible or not doesn't matter - it is the Law, and as a company you cannot flip off the Law and expect to get away with it.

"Finally, why does having the **right to vote** matter to you, if you don't actually accept the rule of law?"

This isn't inconsistent with what he's saying. What he's saying is that he feels only he should decide when breaking the law does and doesn't matter, and that only he should decide who does and does not deserve to vote.

In other words, he's a fond supporter of dictatorship propped up by fake democracy, such as in Iran, Russia and so forth.

Microsoft was forced to put that ballot list up after they deliberately used bundling and threats of OEMs having their Windows license revoked unless they shunned a Microsoft competitor. This tactic was successful in that it ruined Netscape. The list was put there to try and prevent MS from doing it again to another company and as a signal to other tech companies of what happens when you use tactics like that, i.e. very large fines. That bloody ballot list is as much a head on a spike as anything else.

Microsoft was forced to put that ballot list up after they deliberately used bundling and threats of OEMs having their Windows license revoked unless they shunned a Microsoft competitor. This tactic was successful in that it ruined Netscape.

I'm sorry, but Netscape ruined Netscape. It wasn't mainly what Microsoft did (though that must have helped, and it was definitely illegal), but rather what Netscape did. I know lots and lots of people who liked Netscape Navigator (including me), but dropped it after it became Communicator (especially after version 4). Their browser was not as good as IE at that point.

Now I use Mozilla Firefox, and have doing so for a long time (though their poor design choices might have me switching to SRWare Iron or Ope

Its too bad slashdot has been reduced to articles like. I applaud google for helping out the individuals rights to choose what software they run on the computer, and find it shocking that the new slashdot owners are posting an article trying to shun google for helping in an anti-trust case. Aren't we supposed to be on the side of those people fighting for things like this? Next up our new slashdot overlords will be poking fun at the EFF.

Google is a service which gets its audience by doing nice things for people. (read: providing value) For all the things you might fear Google, they keep people coming back with pretty neat and entertaining stuff. They are capitalizing on good will and will defend that whenevery and whereever possible. It is their business model. (Exceptions exist... China)

In my mind, this is more "Tom and Jerry." Tom has spent billions on lawyers, lobbying, bribes/donations/contributions, pulling

Google most definitely does things which people like. I'm not saying it does ONLY stuff which people like. But what keeps the people coming back are useful services including, but not limited to, search, email, chat, forums, shopping... things people like with a quality they can appreciate.

It may come as a surprise that many people pretty much believed that it was that or AOL.Microsoft tried hard to make it one, what with active X and its other propitiatory technology it pushed hard to try to get entrenched.

Now we have choice, very rarely do we need a particular browser to be able to access a site and that was quite common at one time.

The computer literacy needed to use chrome or firefox? Simply to know that they exist and are as capable if not margina

The computer literacy needed to use chrome or firefox? Simply to know that they exist and are as capable if not marginally more so than Microsofts offerings. That was a big change and one part of that change was the browser ballot page that Microsoft agreed to.

Are there any figures for how many people actually downloaded an alternative browser due to the browser ballot page? Nobody I know who isn't interested in computers would even have bothered reading it.

Are you serious? What extra computer literacy do you need to use Firefox or Chrome?

You need to have an ideological or technological interest in taking the time to download and learn the quirks of a new browser that in practice will do exactly the same as Internet Explorer for the normal user.

Sad, sad, sad submitter. Reflects the intellectual poverty of one who has no other idea of this action than "snitching". The very word is negative and implies something is wrong with informing the authorities that Microsoft is breaking the law (again - what a surprise). Where did this even come from? Oh yeah, "snitches get stitches". Who created this meme? Oh yeah, drug dealers who wanted to intimidate the local population into silence. And now the media is going along with it without even thinking of the implications. Good job everyone.

drug dealers who wanted to intimidate the local population into silence

Drug dealers are on the side of freedom in the war on drugs. If it weren't for drug dealers putting their freedom and lives on the line, we wouldn't be seeing the tide turning away from prohibition.

If someone lives in a neighborhood terrorized by drug dealers, the right thing to do isn't snitch. It's to lobby to end the war on drugs. Change drug dealers from outlaws to businessmen. After all, when was the last time someone died in a

Who is Adam Clark Estes? I'd really like to know, because his "article" reads like it was written like a 5-year-old. "Ooooh, you can't snitch on people; the honour code is not to snitch! They are is not are playing fair! They is are doing what they're s'posed to do! They stoled my donut and lunch money but I didn't snitch! Snitches is are naughty!" Is he still in kindergarten?

Who is Adam Clark Estes? I'd really like to know, because his "article" reads like it was written like a 5-year-old.

At five, it is true that children usually do not know the difference between "its" and "it's". I tried to parse "down" as "party-time" before my eyes went back and decided there shouldn't be a verb before "competitor". I thought it was the submitter, but it's from the TFA.

I know for a fact it wasn't only, if at all, Google complaining about the missing ballot screen. I filed a complaint myself. I'd also be surprised if of all competitors Opera didn't file a complaint. The only thing I wonder is, whether my email with the complaint went directly to/dev/null. I've never received a reply.

If Google told on Microsoft, I have no problem with that. Now, Google should inform on Microsoft on trying to control the entire PC market and squash Operating System competition with "their" hated "Trusted computing" platform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing [wikipedia.org]..

Based on Microsoft's track record, how can you a) Trust Microsoft b) Trust ANY company.c) Leave control of your hardware to a corporation that does bidding of governments / media cartel - especially if they are foreign governments.

"Brussels punished Microsoft for failing to give at least 15m consumers a choice of web browser - a violation of a voluntary antitrust pact that was spotted and raised by Google and Opera, according to several people familiar with the case."

"Opera said it was "happy to see that the Commission is enforcing compliance with the commitment, which is critical to ensuring a genuine choice among web browsers for consumers". Google declined to comment."

Copyright and Patents are not a human right, or an undeniable/natural right. They are a made up concept, a contract between society and the copyright/patent holder. "We will allow you to restrict usage of this particular work if you continue to make other works like this for the benefit of society". Sure, it doesn't work that way, but that's what's supposed to be anyway. So, since we are giving someone a privilege, society should be able to set the rules, and take back the privilege if the rules are broken. So the contract should be more like "We will allow you to restrict usage of this particular work for a limited period of time, but you must offer this work under reasonable prices and policies, you must respect your users, and you must play nicely with the rest of the market. Also, you have to deposit all of your source code and any other information you used to create your work, and after that period expires, or if you break the contract, they'll be released to the public domain.". That sounds like a much more rational contract. You want the privilege of copyright or patents? Great, we'll give it to you. We'll give you anywhere between 5 and 15 years of copyright or patent protection, how much will depend on the kind of work you are releasing. In exchange, you have to deposit with us all relevant information regarding your work, for example, source code in the case of software, manufacturing procedures and blueprints in the case of hardware, etc. If you breach this contract, you'll lose all protection, and after the the original protection is over, we'll still release all that information. If your breach of contract is bad enough, we'll also release all those secrets early.

This fine is like making the penalty for bank robbery 25% of the money stolen. Everyone will be robbing banks... it's not a penalty, or a fine, it's a tax. Well, microsoft's benefit from locking down the market far exceeds 731 million dollars, so it's not a fine, it's just tax.

Threaten companies with losing copyright and patent protection, and see how quickly they start to behave.

HSBC was collateral damage. The USA was after some of its slaves (citizens) that dared to venture off the plantation. They refused to participate in the USA's global posse comitatus [wikipedia.org] and paid the price.